Territorial politics and development of major cities in Hungary from the transition to the present day

Abstract

The issues of urban development in Hungary have been receiving increasing attention recently, while the directions and institutional frameworks of regional policy are constantly changing. In this study, we discuss the contents and connotations associated with the concept of major cities in Hungarian territorial policy, and we also examine the changes in the position of these cities within the urban system. Major cities play a key role in territorial development by generating spatial processes, so it is of critical importance what weight and direction these centres with their complex functions are assigned in development concepts. Any design or even the restructuring of spatial processes takes time. Since the democratic transition in 1989-90, cities have been given inconsistent development goals in short order. Cities have not been able to adapt to these constantly changing goals.

In the first part of this study, we present the layered concept of the ‘major city’. We characterise these categories: regional centre, city, county seat and city with county rights. In the second part, we try to locate these centres and examine the changes in their development focuses and paths in the often changing territorial politics of the post-transition period.

Since 1990, major cities and their environs have played a prominent role in territorial policy and development concepts. The development of these centres encompassed various concepts and directions. Since then they had to function as regional administrative centres (1990–1994), as the main and sub-centres of developmental regions (1998–2005), and then as growth poles (2005–2008). In the meantime, they have also been the subject of an abandoned attempt at administrative decentralisation (2006–2010), have later become county-independent development centres (2012–2016) and have now focused on territorial development (Modern Cities Programme, 2015–). In addition to numerous generic development goals, unique and specific development concepts have also been designed for major cities over the past 30 years. Central and local ideas and concepts were well coordinated by several cities, which led to dynamic development, but others were less successful in this synchronisation, so their situation did not really improve.

Attempts at developing major cities into counter-poles to Budapest in the urban network have failed, both before and after the transition. Budapest’s size, economic concentration, its role both in the settlement network and even in Hungarian culture or public thinking and its weight in international networks – all make the capital unique and of matchless importance. And this is reinforced by the fact that the Hungarian political institutional system is monocentric and also controlled from this centre. Decentralisation at the territorial level has proved impossible in Hungary, although there have been several smaller experiments in this direction. Due to the centralised administration and national development, but also because of the strong centralisation of the various state functions themselves, major cities were unable to compete with the ‘capital myth’, despite the creation of many regional organisational functions.